ABSTRACT
Community-power research has progressed through three identifiable stages. The first stage was characterized by case studies of American communities and the various uses of positional, reputational, and issue-decisional methods of identifying influential leaders and decision-making processes. Stage two began with the appearance of comparative studies, both intranational and international. In both stages, emphasis was upon the structure and functioning of the community qua community. It was marked especially in stage two by the combined use of two or more methods of identifying influential leaders and associations. Usually, the reputational and issue-decisional methods were selected. The issues were those considered by community judges to be the most important. It mattered little what the issues were. The researcher simply wanted salient issues in order to identify community leaders and the contours of community decisionmaking processes.
